Tony Robbins said “There is no greatness without a passion to be great, whether it’s the aspiration of an athlete or an artist, a scientist, a parent, or a businessperson.”

Much has been said about the word “passion” in our profession. We were told in school we had to have a passion for chiropractic and a passion to help others.

A weekend seminar with most any chiropractic coaching group will fill you with enough passion to spend thousands of dollars on their services. And we’ve all heard that to be great in life, we must have a passion for what we do.

But what is passion?

Does it really have a place in the modern chiropractic practice?

There can be many uses for the word passion ranging from The Passion (as in the suffering of Christ) to “an outbreak of anger.”

However, the best definition for our for our discussions would be Merriam-Webster’s: “an intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction”.

Sounds like a good thing to have, right?

Not always…

My first year in practice, when I was really struggling, I often went to the gurus of chiropractic to find help. In almost every case, I was told I that I just needed more passion to be successful.

So I would rededicate myself to reading the Green Books, listening to Sigafoose tapes, going to more seminars, telling the chiropractic “story”; a daily “ritual” of passion. I reasoned that if it was passion that made success, I just needed more of it to succeed.

Needless to say, it wasn’t passion that saved my practice, unless you want to call it a “passion for trying to save my family from living on the street!”. (To find out more about my story, see my previous blog posts “Why We Do It?” and “Wait And See Marketing“.)

The type of passion being thrown around chiropractic is not always a good thing. It can lead you into mountains of debt. After all, what’s a few more dollars in debt to save the world, right?

Unbridled passion can cause you to turn decent patients away, by being a ‘my way or the highway’ type of practice. It can also cause you to spend crazy amounts of money on bad marketing that is never going to work.

So you may think I’m saying passion is not important in life. I’m not.

“Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Passion is a tool that you should use to push you forward, in the right direction. It’s a defense against the constant onslaught of skeptics telling you chiropractic doesn’t work. It’s a determination to live a healthy lifestyle and keep out of the drug ‘merry-go-around’ of modern healthcare.

I know it’s rare to hear someone speak out against passion in chiropractic. (Some might consider it blasphemous!)

Hey, I’m not against chiropractic passion. There’s nothing wrong with reading the Green Books or listening to Sigafoose tapes. But don’t think by simply being more passionate, you’re going to have a successful practice.

There are chiropractors who need a bit more philosophy and more passion for chiropractic. But is it really the overriding issue that struggling doctors are suffering from? An outsider attending chiropractic seminars might get think it is. But I would say we have bigger problems keeping chiros down than a lack of passion.